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Dale Carrico on transhumanism

photo of remi sussan

remi sussan
16th August 2006


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From amormundi.blogspot.com/2006/07/posthuman-terrains.htmlÂ

“I have long thought that when Aristotle defined “man” [sic] as the “political animal,” this formulation constituted a fledgling kind of cyborg manifesto written many centuries before Donna Haraway’s own. Aristotle’s definition amounts to the claim that human animals become different in their “essential naturesâ€? when they live together in cities. (…)”

 “The “post-humanâ€? is not one kind of prostheticized person, nor is “post-humanismâ€? a singular response to a particular kind of prostheticized personhood, whether involving digital network immersion, peer-to-peer Netroots democracy, post-Pill feminism, transsexual queerness, post-“disabilityâ€? different-enablement prostheses, open source biopunks and leapfroggers and copyfighters, or what have you — nor certainly the more fantastic identifications with robots or artificial intelligences or aliens that seem to come up so often when “post-humanismâ€? is discussed as a topic.

Such identifications (and, crucially, their attendant disidentifications) are moralistic in form, not ethical. And whatever else we may say of it, the ongoing and upcoming crises of humanism — no less than its emergence with the appearance of the political/rational animal — are profoundly ethical: “Post-humanism,” properly so-called, names the ethical encounters of humanism with itself, the confrontations of a universalism with its historical and practical limits and contradictions. And the ethical visions that emerge either out of (“post” in the sense of “after”) or in resistance to (“post” in the sense of “over”) that confrontation are themselves ethical terms. One might even discern in them the best impulses that have animated humanism in its emancipatory aspect.”

 There is also an interview of Dale Carrico here, where he explains the difference between a “transhumanist” and a “technoprogressive”.

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